Fedora 9 nvidia Disaster Relief

Only brave or stupid people (some think this are the synonyms) upgrade on the day of release. It was not even 24 hours since Fedora 9 became available to the general public, and I already had started installation. It took ten minutes to check the media, and another ten to make necessary preparations (whatever it is, I just clicked “next” and stared at various messages). Next half an hour the system was busy installing some 1103 packages and ten more minutes “finishing upgrade process”…

Now fun began. Nvidia driver was not found on boot and cups failed to start. I was presented with somewhat ugly login screen. In comparison to previous version it looks like severe downgrade. On login nothing was right, and the task bar contained two untitled windows, although none of them were visible on screen, and nothing could be done about them. First I tried to open network configuration to change DNS IP. Our DHCP server keeps sending me the wrong one, and it impacts performance of every internet related task. I rather should ask for static IP than do it every reboot, but always postpone it. Anyway – no luck. No window opened.

At this time security updates arrived for cups, libid3tag, bugzilla, and cups-libs. Closer examination also revealed existence of 12 bug fixes, 3 enhancements, and 199 updates. Every try to apply these either resulted with no reaction, or gave me very informative error message: “Failed to update system. The error was: org.freedesktop.packagekit.update-system auth_admin_keep_always”.

Fortunately I was able to open a terminal window, although it contained no window decorations and was immovable sitting at the top left corner of the first screen. The second screen was annoingly blinking. Yes, I had had dual head display with nicely configured compiz on top of nvidia driver just couple of hours ago… Now I had disaster.

Yum update. It wanted to install 15 and update 216 packages totalling 246M. That is paradox. What is the purpose of downloading ISO image, burning it to DVD, and installing from the media, when you immediately have to download half of your system (assuming most of the packages from DVD you do not even need) again and reinstall it all over? Something like apt-get dist-upgrade is much more sane. I know it is also possible to upgrade with yum. I did so last time, because installation DVD was obviously going into infinite loop checking dependencies. But that practice for some reason discouraged: “Although upgrades with yum have been tested and work, live upgrades are not recommended by the Fedora Project” (Yum Upgrade FAQ).

Anyway, I started update and noticed that terminal window is not on the task bar. The task bar was still occupied with two ghost windows, otherwise empty. After some random clicking around, the mouse cursor turned to a crossed arrows, as if I was dragging something, and desktop stopped responding at all. The clock applet also stopped updating, although network applets were showing traffic, and yum kept downloading updates. At this point I got it, that better not touch anything at all.

After an hour of downloading and ten minutes of installing, yum was done. Nothing except mouse cursor was responding to me at that time. Fortunately I was able to switch to a console with Ctrl+Alt+F1 and ordered shutdown -r now. Update fixed cups, and restored window decorations on terminal window, but otherwise did not help much. I still was unable to get most of the graphical programs running, so I rebooted into Live CD and tried to google the way to restore nvidia. The shocking truth was: THERE IS NO NVIDIA DRIVER FOR FEDORA 9!!! Time to throw yourself out of the window (switch to Vista?).

Reboot, rename broken /etc/X11/xorg.conf, yum erase useless kmod-nvidia, turn off blinking second monitor, back to nv. What now? Downgrade X.org and use old driver? It will break to much shit. Downgrade back to Fedora 8? It is too much work.  Wait until nvidia will come up with new driver? But I can’t effectively work without second monitor. I’m screwed… No, wait, what about these nouveau people? I heard a year ago that that driver is in Fedora 7 already. Is not it the time to try it out?

System > Administration > Display. At “Hardware” tab change video card to use nouveau. Works, but no different from nv. Inside the new xorg.conf in the section “Device” add the Option “Randr12” “on”. Wow, the second monitor came to life, but only as a clone. That is not useful to me. Now copy Monitor section from old xorg.conf and paste it into the new one twice, changing identifiers to “DVI-D-0″ and “DVI-D-1″ respectively, and adding Option “RightOf” “DVI-D-0″ to the second one. And Bingo! I am saved!!!

So it seems to be working and I can do my job. I lost compiz, but hey, that’s just an eye candy. It’s cool and useful, but essentially it’s a luxury. I can live without it, at least for some time, until nouveau will come up with stable 3D rendering. Nvidia two thumbs down for being outdated proprietary evil. Fedora one thumb down for not putting in release notes “Nvidia users STOP! Do not upgrade now!”, and one thumb up for hard work. Nouveau two thumbs up for heroic efforts.

I realize that I’m probably just being lucky that my card (NV44 [Quadro NVS 285]) is already supported. Maybe I’ll face problems later on, here or there, but at least I’ll be able to file a bug report, and even participate in resolving it.